AMERICAN INFERNO by PATRICK DENKER

AMERICAN INFERNO by PATRICK DENKER (Under the Direction of Reginald McKnight) ABSTRACT American Inferno, a novel, is a loose transposition of Dante‟s Inferno into a contemporary American setting. Its chapters (or “circles”) correspond to Dante‟s nine circles of Hell: 1) Limbo, 2) Lust, 3) Gluttony, 4) Hoarding & Wasting, 5) Wrath, 6) Heresy, 7) Violence, 8) Fraud and 9) Treachery. The novel‟s Prologue — Circle 0 — corresponds to the events that occur, in the Inferno, prior to Dante‟s and Virgil‟s entrance into Hell proper. The novel is a contemporary American moral inquiry, not a medieval Florentine one: thus it is sometimes in harmony with and sometimes a critique of Dante‟s moral system. Also, like the Inferno, it is not an investigation just of its characters‟ personal moral struggles, but also of the historical sins of its nation: for Dante, the nascent Italian state; for us, the United States. Thus the novel follows the life story of its principal character as he progresses from menial to mortal sins while simultaneously considering American history from America‟s early Puritan foundations in the Northeast (Chapters 1-4) through slavery, civil war and manifest destiny (Chapters 5-7) to its ultimate expression in the high-technology West-Coast entertainment industry (Chapters 8-9). INDEX WORDS: Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Inferno, Sin, American history, American morality, Consumerism, Philosophical fiction, Social realism, Frame narrative, Christianity, Secularism, Enlightenment, Jefferson, Adorno, Culture industry, lobbying, public relations, advertising, marketing AMERICAN INFERNO by PATRICK DENKER B.A., Duke University, 1992 M.F.A., San Francisco State University, 2002 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2010 © 2010 Patrick Denker All Rights Reserved AMERICAN INFERNO by PATRICK DENKER Major Professor: Reginald McKnight Committee: O. Bradley Bassler Thomas Cerbu Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2010 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Critical Introduction .........................................................................................................................1 Circle 0: Prologue ................................................................ ..........................................................35 Circle 1: Limbo ..............................................................................................................................77 Circle 2: Lust................................................................................................................................111 Circle 3: Gluttony ........................................................................................................................160 Circle 4: Hoarding & Wasting .....................................................................................................192 1 CRITICAL INTRODUCTION For An Old Novel: Craft, Conservatism and a Modern/American Inferno Part 1: Craft The English department of a reputable American university requires that its creative- writing doctoral students produce, as part of their dissertation, a “writing manifesto,” an “essay about craft” (“Graduate Student Handbook”). The very term itself — craft — is curious. It gets bandied about creative-writing circles a lot. Sometimes it‟s used to refer to writers‟ formal aesthetics, sometimes to their thematic concerns (which might or might not include their politics), and sometimes to their writing “process” (e.g. what role caffeine, opium or benzodiazepines might play in the writer‟s act of writing — as they did for Balzac, Coleridge and Kerouac, respectively). For the purposes of this essay, I‟ll take craft to refer primarily to the first two items: aesthetics and thematics, a.k.a. good old “form and content.”1 I have no problem with old tools — when they work. 1 My demon interrupts: “But are not form and content inseparable?” They are, as apples are from apple pie. We can, nevertheless, distinguish meaningfully between apples and apple pie; if we couldn‟t, we‟d have sticky lunch sacks and drab desserts. 2 Get your laws off my ouvre Is it even a good idea for a writer to produce a manifesto? Couldn‟t there be something stultifying about committing oneself to a certain aesthetic or thematic program? Shouldn‟t a writer‟s craft change, to some extent at least, from work to work? Shouldn‟t they try their hand at different forms and styles? Surely craft considerations differ significantly from genre to genre: surely the craft considerations of the “realistic” novel differ significantly from those of the magical-realist novel, the experimental novel, the romance, the thriller. Surely what the writer‟s called on to master (or to question) differs greatly between high-brow, small-run, “literary” fiction as opposed to “trade press” work.2 Perhaps a given writer‟s craft differs from work to work and perhaps it doesn‟t, but it seems obvious to say that, to some extent at least, it should; if it didn‟t, we‟d be consigning writers to stultification — to the late-career self-mimicry of writers such as (so they say) Faulkner or Hemingway. What‟s to be gained, and what lost, by having a consistent craft that one works out (or trots out?) in book after book? Is a writer‟s craft, as reflected in a given work, something that he should produce an apologia for, or is it something that he should apologize for? 2 And while we might think it easy to distinguish between genres and between markets — between high and low, literature and pulp, art and entertainment — are they not also like the apples and the pie? Some pornography has been canonized, and some high literature is masturbatory. If the distinction between the mind and the belly is absolute and clear, then so is the one between art and entertainment; if not, then not. 3 Teaching as violence If the relativism of craft implied in the above passage has any truth to it, it might cause trouble for creative-writing pedagogy. If there are no general rules or standards for the craft of writing creative prose, it‟s not clear how one could teach creative writing without constantly doing violence to the craft of a particular writer‟s particular work. Perhaps teaching writing is something that one can do properly only one-on-one, work by work, letting each individual work convey its own self-expectations and judging it by its own standard. That‟s the sentiment that John Gardner expresses on the first page of his The Art of Fiction: “Every true work of art … must be judged primarily, though not exclusively, by its own laws” (Gardner 3). Of course, we do exactly that, in creative-writing workshops, to an extent. Or at least, any halfway-decent writing teacher does. A writing teacher who imposes his particular generic or stylistic preferences on his students, ignoring or discouraging work in other genres and styles, is simply a poor teacher (unless it‟s an expressly specialized course). And after Gardner‟s page- one caveat, he does, after all, go on to write a 200-page book about the do‟s and don‟ts of good writing. There‟s something to be lauded about a little instructional violence. Teaching can be violent. To correct error is violent; to confront prejudice is violent; to suggest a better (or merely another) perspective on a topic is violent. Teaching writing is no different. Each genre — each set of aesthetic predilections and craft techniques — has its strengths and weaknesses, its tricks and tools. The “realistic” prose writer can learn a lot about imagination from the fantasy novelist, and the fantasist can learn a lot about constructing a believable fictional world from the realist. The prose writer can learn a lot about piquant, shapely, rhythmic language from the poet, 4 and the poet can learn a lot about everyday language (and perhaps a bit about everyday experience) from the writer of prose. Show, don‟t tell It certainly seems as if there are at least some universal rules — or, as Gardner better calls them, recommended techniques (Gardner 8) — for the writing of creative fiction. At least, we teach it as if there were: they‟re the bromides one finds in almost every writing workshop or book on craft, Show, don‟t tell being the emperor of them all, the Golden Rule of writing. The long form of the maxim goes something like this: Show, don‟t tell; dramatize, don‟t analyze. Use exposition sparingly, when you need to cover a lot of plot-ground quickly. Dramatization creates a tangible world that the reader can enter. Instead of saying “John looked nauseous,” describe John‟s face turning pale, his lips quivering, the saliva backing up in his mouth. The reader can identify with (can feel, can literally sym-pathize with) concrete, detailed description. It puts flesh on the bones of whatever you‟re trying to get the reader to imagine. Anyone who‟s ever taken a creative-writing workshop will surely have heard the maxim, and I can‟t imagine that it doesn‟t appear, in some permutation, in every single mainstream creative-writing handbook, e.g.: “It is always dangerous to depend too much on words that tell rather than show” (Jason & Lefcowitz 57). Sometimes the maxim is attributed to Henry James‟ self-direction to “Dramatize, dramatize!” (James), but its roots go further back. You can find it 5 in Aristotle, naturally: “Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity:

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